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jart10/11/20243 repliesview on HN

Ollama is great if you're really in love with the idea of having your multi gigabyte models (likely the majority of your disk space) stored in obfuscated UUID filenames. Ollama also still hasn't addressed the license violations I reported to them back in March. https://github.com/ollama/ollama/issues/3185


Replies

hedgehog10/11/2024

I wasn't aware of the license issue, wow. Not a good look especially considering how simple that is to resolve.

The model storage doesn't bother me but I also use Docker so I'm used to having a lot of tool-managed data to deal with. YMMV.

Edit: Removed question about GPU support.

codetrotter10/11/2024

I think this is also a problem in a lot of tools, that is never talked about.

Even myself I’ve not thought about this so deeply, even though I am also very concerned about honoring other people’s work and that licenses are followed.

I have some command line tools for example that I’ve written in Rust that depend on various libraries. But because I distribute my software in source form mostly, I haven’t really paid attention to how a command-line tool which is distributed as a compiled binary would make sure to include attribution and copies of the licenses of its dependencies.

And so the main place where I’ve given more thought to those concerns is for example in full-blown GUI apps. There they usually have an about menu that will include info about their dependencies. And the other part where I’ve thought about it is in commercial electronics making use of open source software in their firmware. In those physical products they usually include either some printed documents alongside the product where attributions and license texts are sometimes found, and sometimes if the product has a display, or a display output, they have a menu you can find somewhere with that sort of info.

I know that for example Debian is very good at being thorough with details about licenses, but I’ve never looked at what they do with command line tools that compile third-party code into them. Like does Debian package maintainers then for example dig up copies of the licenses from the source and dependencies and put them somewhere in /usr/share/ as plain text files? Or do the .deb files themselves contain license text copies you can view but which are not installed onto the system? Or they work with software authors to add a flag that will show licenses? Or something else?

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gertop10/12/2024

Llamafile is great if you don't want to run any meaningful models because it's limited to 4GB.

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